Underappreciated Stuff

Just my personal list of stuff in life that is unquestionably cool but rarely praised.  I’m sure I’ll be adding to this list in the future, but here’s the first things that come to mind:

• Lunch dates with my wife.  Gets each of us out of our respective offices, we can choose a restaurant without the need to wonder if they have something the kids will like, and we don’t have to find a babysitter because the kids are still in school.  A staple of any successful marriage.
• Free coffee and tea, including iced tea, from my company’s cafeteria.  When I first came to work here over eight years ago, I literally didn’t believe my new co-workers when they told me this.  For the grand total of 40 cents I can get coffee or tea and a fresh-baked muffin for breakfast every morning without having to make any stops on the way to work.  Ingenious.
• Buddy Holly.  Due to a confluence of tragic circumstances – his untimely death, little remaining live footage of him performing, legal wrangling over the rights to his likeness and music, etc. – he’s just not heard all that much anymore.  (I mean, just look at the official Buddy Holly website.  Pitiful.)  Is everyone out there aware of the fact that he’s considered one of the pillars of rock ‘n roll?  Not only was he considered a seminal performer, but a groundbreaking songwriter and arranger as well.  His fingerprints have been on all rock music for the past 50 years.
• eBay.  It seems obvious now, but remember back in the day when it was virtually impossible to find some rare items without a massive air-sea-ground search effort?  Sure, eBay killed local mom and pop baseball cards shops, and that’s sad, but the amount of stuff we now have access to that we didn’t before more than offsets that sad fact.  My wife had a half-complete collection of Charlie’s Angels cards from the late-70s that she had no hope of ever finishing until eBay came about.  Now she not only has the complete set, but I get to take all the credit for finding the cards and giving them to her for birthday or Christmas presents.  Talk about a win-win.  When my family does their drawing of names for Christmas every year, people kill to have me draw them because I always find something cool on eBay.  We got a one-of-a-kind KISS lamp for my brother-in-law, a Boston College High School football jersey for my BC High-alum father, and countless other unique items that I would have never found locally.  It’s simply indispensable.
• DVRs.  I’ve had one for about a year and I have literally no idea what I’d do without it.  Forget recording shows, the pause and rewind features are easily more valuable to me.  I use them so much that I’ll find myself reaching for the remote even when I’m watching from a place where there is no DVR capability, like a bar or hotel room.  Having the simple ability to back up a key play when watching a game, check out a close call on slow-motion, or pause the screen when the phone rings, has completely changed how I watched television.